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I have created a plot from a very large vector (magnitude of 10^7). The problem with the usual way of saving the plot as a pdf file is that the pdf file comes out as a very large file of around 10MB. I don't want such a large size for a simple time series plot. How do I save the plot such that the size is small enough to be at most 100kilobytes?
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If you're running R through Rstudio, then the easiest way to save your image is to click on the “Export” button in the Plot panel (i.e., the area in Rstudio where all the plots have been appearing). When you do that you'll see a menu that contains the options “Save Plot as PDF” and “Save Plot as Image”.
You can export your plots in many different formats but the most common are, pdf, png, jpeg and tiff. By default, R (and therefore RStudio) will direct any plot you create to the plot window. To save your plot to an external file you first need to redirect your plot to a different graphics device.
You can either print directly a ggplot into PNG/PDF files or use the convenient function ggsave() for saving a ggplot. The default of ggsave() is to export the last plot that you displayed, using the size of the current graphics device. It also guesses the type of graphics device from the extension.
baptiste is on the right track with their suggestion of png for a nice raster type plot. In contrast to Jdbaba's suggestion of copying the open device, I suggest that you make a call to the png()device directly. This will save a lot of time in that you won't have to load the plot in a separate device window first, which can take a long time to load if the data set is large.
#plotting of 1e+06 points
x <- rnorm(1000000)
y <- rnorm(1000000)
png("myplot.png", width=4, height=4, units="in", res=300)
par(mar=c(4,4,1,1))
plot(x,y,col=rgb(0,0,0,0.03), pch=".", cex=2)
dev.off() #only 129kb in size
see ?png for other settings of the png device.
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